Centre unveils list of 98 smart cities

Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu unveiled a list of 98 cities with Uttar Pradesh taking the largest share of developing 13 smart cities followed by Tamil Nadu, which qualified to develop 12.

With an aim to achieve “inclusive growth”, the Smart City Mission promotes integrated city planning, where the government’s policies such as Swachh Bharat Mission and Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation complement each other.

The Ministry will impose fines on States that violate the timeline of 60 days of finalising the projects.

Of the 98 cities and towns that five years down will graduate into smart cities, 24 are capital cities, another 24 are business and industrial centres, 18 are culture and tourism influenced areas, five are port cities and three are education and health care hubs.

Nine cities, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Shimla, Puducherry, Daman, Patna, Itanagar, Thiruvananthapuram and Gangtok did not qualify for being a smart city

The success of the government’s Smart City Mission is largely dependent upon the finance generation at the State-level as well as private investments. The Centre has set aside Rs. 48,000 crore for the mission and the money will be released to urban local bodies at frequent intervals in the next five years. The Centre has asked the State governments to generate the rest of the Rs. 48,000 crore as the grand total of the mission is estimated at Rs. 96,000 crore.

The list of nomination marks the first stage in the selection process of smart cities, in which the state governments nominated potential cities and the Centre shortlisted 100.

In the second stage, the government will provide Rs 2 crore each to the nominated cities with which they have to prepare their “smart city proposals”.

From these 100 cities, 20 will be shortlisted as smart cities, following which the central government will allocate Rs 100 crore to each for its development. The government will spend about Rs 3 lakh crore over the next five years on the smart city project.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched the Smart Cities Mission in June and had said that the selected cities will have “very high quality of life comparable with any developed European city”.The list of nomination marks the first stage in the selection process of smart cities, in which the state governments nominated potential cities and the Centre shortlisted 100.